Being a 16-year-old
safecracker and active-duty daughter of international spies has its
moments, good and bad. Pros: Seeing the world one crime-solving
adventure at a time. Having parents with super cool jobs. Cons: Never
staying in one place long enough to have friends or a boyfriend. But for
Maggie Silver, the biggest perk of all has been avoiding high school
and the accompanying cliques, bad lunches, and frustratingly simple
locker combinations. Then Maggie and her parents are sent to New York
for her first solo assignment, and all of that changes. She'll need to
attend a private school, avoid the temptation to hack the school's
security system, and befriend one aggravatingly cute Jesse Oliver to
gain the essential information she needs to crack the case . . . all
while trying not to blow her cover.

Margaret [Redacted], AKA Maggie Silver, AKA Peggy, Maisie, Molly,
Margie, or Meg. Suspect has a long history of espionage, dating back
thirteen years. She is believed to be a member of the Collective,
working as the safecracker on a team of two or three other intelligence
agents. These team members are believed to be her immediate family.
Suspect should not be considered armed or dangerous, but is believed to
be exceptionally emotionally volatile.

Maggie learned to pick locks when she was three. Being born to a hacker and...what is
her dad’s speciality? (Actually, the first chapter makes her parents
seem AWESOME. Orphans who met during the fall of communism in Moscow and
became spies together? Spin-off, please.) Anyway, being born to two
spies means she was never destined for a normal childhood. Maggie is
cracking bad guys’ safes in Luxembourg and Bosnia before her baby teeth
fall out. Her family and the Collective are good spies, only gathering
information and stolen good to take down baddies. They fly around on
private jets, collecting evidence of human trafficking rings and art
forgery, living in the shadows, but now a newspaper has information on
the group and is threatening to name names.

Maggie is assigned
her first solo mission. Enter private school, befriend Jesse Oliver, son
of the newspaper magnate, and use him to gain access to Papa Oliver’s
files. This turns out to be far harder than expected, because (shock!)
high school really, really blows. Maggie befriends the drunken former
mean-girl Roux as her ONLY teenage acquaintance, severely limiting her
social standing and causing her to have to bail on missions to drag her
alcoholic ass home. Fortunately, she does manage to end up in Jesse’s
presence. Unfortunately she happens to be shouting into a cell phone at
the time that she’s really a good spy, really! Congratulations Maggie,
you've blown decades of covers in two seconds because you can’t use code
words or wait until you get home to complain to your mom that she’s
being totes unfair.

Luckily, Jesse is dumb as a box of rocks and
accepts the lie that she was talking to Roux about their Halloween
party. That she tries to convince Roux to throw as her alibi. And Roux
says no. And that’s not weird to Jesse, because he’s throwing a
Halloween party himself and now the girls get to go! Before they leave,
Maggie’s assigned her family friend and forger, Angelo, as her tail. She
throws a complete shit-fit because grown-ups don’t need back-up,
mooooooom!

Now seems like a good point to stop and say all of the
“spies” in this book are just terrible. Maggie, despite having 13 years
experience, is whiny, petulant, unsubtle, and entirely too trusting of
her new friend and boyfriend. Her parents, who would have 22 years of
experience and just spent months establishing and infiltrating an
Icelandic human trafficking ring, lose their minds that the job isn't
done in one day. They nag incessantly, refuse to trust Maggie for a
single second, and blame her for their bad intel. Again, Maggie's no
saint, but enforcing a curfew on a working spy and almost blowing her
cover because you just HAD to go to parent-teacher conferences? I was
starting to wonder if they were trying to sabotage her mission.

Angelo
is the only one who does anything remotely spy-y for the whole book,
and is also the only one who seems to remember Maggie is a trained
agent, which of course means he's fooled by fake intel and disappears
before the climax. Despite training, Maggie's spy work never moves
beyond Harriet the. That works when taking a MasterLock tm off a fence
to impress a boy, but to go into the big baddy's hideout with a diamond
tipped drill but no lock picks? Sydney Bristow she is not.

In the end, Also Known As
isn't much of a spy novel. It's a fish-out-of-water story with a tepid
romance, funny sidekick, and a mystery that barely starts until the
third act, just in time for Maggie to find her unique voice, rebel to
show her parents she's trustworthy, and get the boy. It's an average
representation of high school with some completely ludicrous details,
fine to good side characters, and wit. That it doesn't take itself too
seriously is Also Known As's greatest strength. Still, it's more Goldmember than Goldfinger.

3 comments:

And I was looking forward to reading this. I really liked Audrey, Wait and I was super excited for an awesome spy novel because spy novels are awesome. Great review. Looks like, I'll not be reading this one.